This invention relates to methods and means for relaying calls between hearing impaired telephone callers using TDD (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf) or ASCII (a computer protocol) technology and other users including voice users, and particularly to calls accommodating such calls to different languages that a caller may use.
In present systems, a communications assistant (CA) at a relay station provides telecommunication relay service (TRS) by translating signals from a hearing-impaired caller using a TDD or ASCII and another party using voice.
With current technology, a hearing impaired person initiates a TDD call with a keyboard having an alphanumeric display or a printer and the call arrives at a relay center. A PBX (post branch exchange) routes the call to a CA, i.e. a communications assistant or a communications attendant or operator, who now stops all other work. A modem at the CA position auto-answers and attempts to synchronize with the caller. After synchronization, the modem plays a prompt such as "TRS HERE CA 1234 GA". The latter identifies the communication assistant's number such as 1234 and gives a signal such as GA meaning "go ahead". This process consumes about ten seconds on the average, and wastes ten seconds of the communication assistant's time. The caller now supplies the forward number, i.e. the number to call, plus special billing information, if any. A typical caller response would be "PLEASE CALL 708 555-1212 GA". On the average, it takes twenty to 30 seconds for the caller to type this information. The fastest callers complete this initial transaction in about five seconds. The slowest can take several minutes. The communication assistant can do nothing until the caller types "GA". This involves a waste of the CA's time.
After the caller types "GA" the CA types the forward number and billing information into a billing record and then manually dials the call. This constitutes the first useful work that the CA has done on this call. A minimum of fifteen seconds has been wasted, but on the average about 30 to 40 seconds are wasted waiting for the caller's "GA". This occurs on every ASCII or TDD originated call. The total accumulated time wasted in connected calls is substantial.
It is only after the communications assistant receives the GA signal that communication assistant performs the useful work of translating between TDD signals and voice signals.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,157,559 discloses a text-to-speech synthesizer that grammatically parses the text received from a hearing impaired party after the operator or CA has connected the call. This system is quite complex and still requires the operator for connecting the call.
The co-pending application Ser. No. 147,391, filed Nov. 4, 1993, improves this situation by automatically prompting a TDD caller for calling information, grammatically parsing received calling information to determine a forward number to one of a number of calling assistants for automatic dialing by the assistant.
According to another aspect of the copending application, the parser program or subroutine looks for a signal that the grammatical input has been terminated by a go ahead signal, for example "GA", and when finding one, signals to route the call to the next available assistant.
Such arrangements operate exceedingly well if all callers speak one language, i.e. the most common language, as English. However when a significant number of callers employ other languages such as Spanish, problems arise. CAs that speak the other language or are multilingual are a special resource that should be used efficiently. An oversupply of other-language CAs or multilingual CAs is wasteful. On the other hand, using a scarce resource for English, for routing callers to the right CA is also wasteful.
An object of the invention is to improve methods and means for handling such calls.
Another object of the invention is to avoid the aforementioned problems.